Bernie Orenstein, the Canadian writer and producer who worked on such sitcoms as That Girl, Sanford and Son, What’s Happening!! and Kate & Allie over nearly a half-century in television, died Sept. 14, his family announced. He was 95.
Orenstein had his first big success in the 1960s during his three-year stint as a writer on the ABC variety show The Hollywood Palace and shortly after that teamed with Saul Turteltaub for the first time. They would be partners for 30-plus years — even though they rarely worked together in the same room — as one of the most enduring TV comedy teams ever.
“I would write one act, [Turteltaub] would write the other act, and we’d put it together and make sure they fit. Often he would write a whole script and I would write a whole script,” Orenstein told Adrienne Faillace in a 2016 interview for the TV Academy Foundation website The Interviews. “But we never wrote together, one of us at the typewriter, the other walking behind him pitching lines, like most sitcoms writers do.”
Orenstein said he learned a great deal about comedy from Carl Reiner, who hired him and Turteltaub for the 1971-74 CBS sitcom The New Dick Van Dyke Show.
He and Turteltaub began writing episodes of That Girl in 1967 for its first season, and they served as writer-producers on the ground-breaking ABC feminist comedy for its final two years. (Orenstein said they hurt the show’s ratings by having Marlo Thomas’ Ann Marie become engaged to her longtime boyfriend, Ted Bessell’s Donald Hollinger.)
They would make a similar move after they joined CBS’ Kate & Allie in 1988 and got Susan Saint James’ character a husband. “We made sure it was the final season by getting her married, a lesson we should have learned on That Girl,” Orenstein said.
The duo came aboard the Redd Foxx-starring Sanford and Son (developed by Bud Yorkin and Norman Lear) as producer-writers in 1974 for the fourth season and stayed through the sitcom’s end in 1977.
They had partnered with Yorkin, who had recently split with Lear, to launch TOY Productions, and the new company landed three comedies on ABC: What’s Happening!!, revolving around Black teens growing up in Watts; Carter Country, with Victor French and Kene Holliday as small-town cops; and 13 Queens Boulevard, starring Eileen Brennan.
Orenstein and Turteltaub also wrote and produced for Love, American Style and Baby Talk, starring Scott Baio, both for ABC; created CBS’ E/R, featuring Elliott Gould and George Clooney; and wrote for NBC’s One of the Boys, which starred Mickey Rooney alongside youngsters Dana Carvey and Nathan Lane; NBC’s You Again?, with Jack Klugman and John Stamos; and CBS’ Cosby.
They also created Chicken Soup, a 1989 ABC comedy starring Jackie Mason and Lynn Redgrave that was canceled, much to Orenstein’s disappointment, after seven episodes despite having the mega-hit Roseanne as its lead-in.
On that show, Mason’s character “was dating a tall, Irish redhead [Redgrave]. He was a short, Jewish guy. I’m a short, Jewish guy. My wife [actress Barbara Rhoades, Orenstein’s wife] is a tall, Irish redhead,” he explained. “I said, ‘It’s perfect, I know everything we can do!’
“But no one could believe that she would be the least bit interested in somebody like Jackie Mason the way he acted on the show. That was its downfall. That was my fault. I was positive that my life would be accepted by America. Apparently, it wasn’t.”
The youngest of five boys, Bernard Orenstein (he had no middle name, “we were too poor for that,” he joked) was born in Toronto on Feb. 5, 1931. His father sold women’s clothing and had a gambling problem, and his mother was a homemaker.
As a youngster, Orenstein acted on CBC radio programs, then appeared on the network’s TV variety shows after dropping out at the University of Toronto.
“I was awful, to tell you the truth,” he said. “Nevertheless, it was easy in those days. Nobody knew anything about television. They paid very little, and anybody who had any nerve to get up in front of a camera was accepted. I had nerve as opposed to talent.”
Orenstein acted and wrote for the CBC variety program The Barris Beat, produced by Norman Jewison, then moved to New York in 1965 and landed on the CBS prank show Candid Camera. He carpooled with another writer, Joan Rivers, until she was fired the day after she went on Johnny Carson‘s The Tonight Show and was a hit. Host Allen Funt “didn’t want anyone who was a bigger star, possibly, than he was,” Orenstein said.
He came to Los Angeles to write for ABC’s The Les Crane Show, and when that late-night talk show fell victim to Carson, he got producer Nick Vanoff to let him fulfill his contract on The Hollywood Palace, where he wrote material for the likes of Bing Crosby, Judy Garland and Fred Astaire.
He got an offer to write the pilot for a Pat Boone afternoon talk show in 1967 and enlisted Turteltaub, whom he had met in New York, to help. Turteltaub worked on the Boone program as Orenstein stuck with Hollywood Palace and wrote for NBC’s The Monkees, but the pair got together in the evenings to write for sitcoms.
The first scripts they sold were for the comedies Hey, Landlord at NBC, Good Morning, World at CBS and That Girl. They also wrote and produced the 1968 NBC variety program The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show, hiring an unknown Lorne Michaels to lend them a hand.
In 1971, the writers relocated to Arizona to work on The New Dick Van Dyke Show (the star played a Carson-like host) before returning to L.A. two years later to produce Love, American Style.
They jumped to Sanford and Son at the request of Lear, who needed producers who could get along with the temperamental Foxx, who at the time was sitting out the show in a contract dispute.
“We got along with him famously,” Orenstein said. “He was very protective of us, the two white Jewish guys writing a Black show and coming under criticism from the Beverly Hills [chapter of the] NAACP.” Once, he recalled, he and Turteltaub got in their cars in the middle of the night to help find Foxx’s dog, who had gotten loose. (They also bought a couple episodes written by Garry Shandling.)
When Foxx exited for a lucrative ABC deal, the pair worked on the spinoffs Grady and Sanford Arms. And for What’s Happening!!, Orenstein spotted Fred Berry and hired him to play Rerun, giving the character a nickname earned from having to take classes over and over.
After Columbia Pictures’ Screen Gems bought TOY Productions — the sale went through in 1979 on the day What’s Happening!!, Carter Country and 13 Queens Boulevard were canceled — they worked for Columbia on One of the Boys and One in a Million, starring What’s Happening!! actress Shirley Hemphill.
They two later helped future Murphy Brown creator Diane English gain a foothold in television by executive producing her 1985-86 CBS comedy, Foley Square.
After he and Turteltaub spent two years as story consultants on Cosby, Orenstein returned to school to get his college degree; wrote two novels, 2011’s Fender Mason, about horse racing, and 2013’s Black Sheep, about comedy and crime; taught TV history at Long Island University in Brooklyn; and bred thoroughbreds.
In addition to his second wife, whom he married in February 1979, survivors include his children, Lisa, Barbara, Jenny and Alec; eight grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. “He lived with boundless creativity, humor and love, always keeping family close and finding joy in every moment, his family noted.
In his TV Academy Foundation interview, Orenstein acknowledged that he had many more misses than hits.
“If you look at my résumé, it’s really depressing if you ever wanted to be in the business,” he said. “Although I wrote hundreds of scripts and produced, I don’t know, 40 shows, I’d say only four or five of them were really successful. It’s not an easy business. But as a writer, you’re never out of work. You can always sit down in front of a typewriter.”